as any man, maybe better, you read me, mister? They’ve already had to
work ten times harder than any man aboard just to get where they are
now, and if I hear you’re giving any one of ’em a bad time I am
personally going to have you keel-hauled … and on an aircraft carrier
that’s one hell of a damned serious threat!”
Fuck. Women had their uses, but they didn’t belong aboard ship or
flying combat aircraft. Oh, sure, he’d heard all the technical shit
about how they could take more Gs than men, how their endurance was
higher, how they could handle multiple tasks better than men could.
Willis didn’t believe that bullshit for a minute. The fact of it was
the Washington REMFs were out to screw the little people, again, all in
the name of progress.
Payne gave the array of flight instruments in front of him a final
check.
What the hell was Washington playing at anyway? It seemed fitting,
somehow, that the venerable A-6 was on the way out, just as all this new
crap was coming on-line.
He loved the A-6. America’s premier strike aircraft was coming up on
forty years of service. Butt-ugly, blunt end up front, eel-skinny tail
aft, with the permanently fixed refueling probe stuck on the nose like a
rearing snake. The Navy had hoped to replace the Intruder with the
ultra-stealthy A-12 Avenger in the 1990s, but the Secretary of Defense
had scrapped the project when budget overruns had reached scandal
proportions. Later, during the Clinton Administration, proponents of a
streamlined military had actually suggested that, since the Air Force
had bombers, there was no need for bomb-carrying aircraft in the Navy.
And there was real shit-for-brains thinking. Strike aircraft–the
Intruder and the half-bomber, half-fighter Hornet–were the sole reason
for even having aircraft carriers in the first place. Jefferson’s
Intruders were her big guns; her Tomcats were nothing more than armed
protection for the carrier group and for her strike planes. Do away
with Navy bombers and there was no reason for carriers.
So far, the Navy had managed to hold off the reconstructionists, at
least to that extent. Until someone came up with a replacement for the
A-12, though, Intruders and Hornets would be carrying the Navy’s
strike-mission load. Like the A-7 Corsair before it, though, already
phased out save for reserve squadrons ashore, the A-6 had about reached
the end of its operational life. Pretty soon, there’d be only the
F/A-18s left to carry the war to the enemy’s home ground, and Payne
remained convinced that Hornets were neither fish nor fowl, half-breeds
that did neither job well. How could they? Even with their
twenty-first-century cockpits, one man was just kept too damned busy
flying the aircraft to handle all the radar-intercept and bombing work
as well with any kind of efficiency.
Man, the Navy should’ve stuck with upgraded Intruders.
And all-male combat crews.
And screw the damned politicians.
He’d heard scuttlebutt that Sunshine had been trying to get another
partner, and that suited Willis just fine. He had to admit that, so far
at least, Sunshine seemed to know her shit. But now they were about to
launch into combat, and her life and his would be riding on how well she
performed her duties as B/N. Hell, they wouldn’t even be able to find
the target if she couldn’t untangle that gee-whiz video-game imagery on
her screen into solid coordinates and vectors.
Besides, she was a goody-two-shoes bitch. When he tried to be friendly,
she acted like he was coming on to her. Once, he’d stepped aside to let
her enter a compartment first and she’d given him a look to freeze a
snowman’s balls. And then there was the smoking incident. Willis had
once been a heavy smoker. He’d been cutting back a lot lately, but he
always carried an extra pack still in the cellophane tucked away in the
shoulder pocket of his flight suit. The first time he’d offered
Sunshine a smoke, though, just trying to be friendly, she’d looked up at
him like he’d just crawled out from under a rock.
“Filthy habit,” she’d said. “Get those things out of my face.”